1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management method for a service for storing data from a memory card in an external storage device and a system for carrying out the service.
2. Related Background Art
In recent years, a memory technology has made a remarkable advance, and a storage capacity of a memory has been increasing year after year. As a product to which the memory is applied, a memory card such as a PC card or a CF card has been spread to the general public.
The above-mentioned memory card is often used for a photographing apparatus or the like such as a digital camera or a video camera.
A capacity of such a memory card is proportional to costs for manufacturing the memory card. Therefore, for example, a user of a digital camera purchases and uses a memory card with an arbitrary data capacity taking into account a balance between the costs and the capacity. In addition, since a capacity of a memory card does not change if it is purchased once, in general, the user purchases a memory card with a little larger capacity, taking into account a maximum capacity which will be required in future.
Further, the user once transfers image data recorded in the memory card to a hard disk or the like of a computer, browses the image data on a display of the computer, and prints it.
On the other hand, according to the advance of a communication technology in recent years, there has been proposed a service in which a cellular phone or the like is connected to a digital camera to allow image data of an image photographed by the digital camera to be transferred to a data server in a remote place and stored therein. In using such a service, a user enters into an agreement with a data server provider in advance and transfers images which are photographed and stored in a memory of the camera to the data server.
However, when a memory card is purchased, a user is often undecided about how much memory capacity the user requires. Thus, there is a problem in that most users may purchase a memory with a capacity larger than is actually required. In addition, there is also a problem in that a user may purchase a memory with a small capacity and the capacity turns out to be insufficient. In this case, the user has to buy a fresh memory with a large capacity. After all, the users are forced to incur unnecessary expenditures.